/edu/ - Education

>>19185
uyghas be bot testing

Sighh,,

Some people got it ITT so I dunno why I have to do this

>we live under capitalism
>what is more probable:
>gaining material wealth under capitalism
>gaining the same material wealth after dedicating ourself to a suicidal socialist revolution?
obviously, logically, statistically, we much easier gain by playing the grain than going against it.

>>19188
I mean considering no one dedicated themselves to a communist revolution and gained material wealth, vs all the dumbasses who started a smoll business and got ridiculously wealthy, it's not up for debate.

>>19188
The system goes against it's own grain, ergo that's impossible as an individual that can't superposition.

>>19176
>Long paragraph that didn't even reply to the quote.
Yes I did, you just don't understand. Let me elaborate with an example.

Back in the day, it was "moral" to own human beings as slaves. Now (in most places of the world at least) it isn't. Marxists see morality as something that is influenced as a result of a society's connection to the economic "mode of production". It was "moral" to own slaves because slavery played an ultimate role in the economic stability of society so the ruling class used "morality" to justify slavery because it kept them the capitalists in control.

What I am saying is that Marxism does not use morality as a way of seeing/analyzing the world (therefore it isn't moralistic) because it sees morality as a byproduct of class society.

>Obviously the people lacking ability to provide for their needs.
Read The Communist Manifesto or the Principles of Communism as well as some supplementary text/videos that help elaborate upon those works. It seems you don't know what I meant. "Needy" is a meaningless term in regards to the overall question. Why can't these people get what they need? Because the capitalist system keeps them from doing that. It twists them. It alienates them (and all of us as well). It kills them. Because that is how it works. But in doing so it creates the conditions for its own destruction, not of the self interest of one, but the necessity of the many.

>>19186
>easy
Who said this is gonna be easy? it will be done nonetheless.
>Can you tell me with a straitght face that it's easier to topple capitalism than to accumulate wealth under capitalism?
This is as silly as that "well you still live in society, curious" meme. People sell their labor for pay and some take those excess profits and become petty bourgeois. This does not erase the fact that capitalism creates way more workers than capitalists and therefore will eventually lead to clashes between these classes. So no, it won't be easy, but it will be done. And also it isn't easy for most workers to amass wealth under capitalism anyway, that is the whole fucking reason why they would overthrow the system.

>>19191
>Yes I did, you just don't understand. Let me elaborate with an example.
Like I said to the other guy and we agreed morality and ethics and whatever is a semantic argument.
>>19191
>Why can't these people get what they need? Because the capitalist system keeps them from doing that.
A lot of people have needs including cripples who can't provide anything for us under any system yet we provide for them according to our ability, why?

>Who said this is gonna be easy? it will be done nonetheless.
No logic to that statement, like saying christ will return regardless,.


>>19191
>This is as silly as that "well you still live in society, curious" meme. People sell their labor for pay and some take those excess profits and become petty bourgeois. This does not erase the fact that capitalism creates way more workers than capitalists and therefore will eventually lead to clashes between these classes. So no, it won't be easy, but it will be done. And also it isn't easy for most workers to amass wealth under capitalism anyway, that is the whole fucking reason why they would overthrow the system.
Fate is the domain of the religious.

>>19148
>Maybe you should become an isolationist state like NK or Cuba
Cuba isn't isolationist you dishonest Amerilard, it's blockaded.
MARS BAR PAPRIKA!

Idk if OP dropped the drop or w/e but I think the focus a lot of people have here on productive forces and self interest as personal reasons to advocate and work for communism is pretty silly and gets too hung up on anti-moralism and anti-humanism.

Marx describes labor-power as a commodity unique in that it is grounded in the "moral-historical subject", i.e. humans. The combination of terms here of moral and historical is crucial – morality is neither paramount nor transhistorical, but neither is it irrelevant to the perceptions, placement, and behavior of the historical human subject.

I'll be less esoteric and just say, I am enraged by the range of exploitation and misery wrought towards the ends of capital accumulation. I feel and think that it's bad because it hurts people, it restricts them from flourishing. I dont think there is an essential human nature or default human morality, but I do think there is an obvious tendency to recoil at suffering and consider whether it can be prevented. There are also rational (though not necessarily correct) tendencies that justify and explain suffering as necessary, just, or inevitable. I think morality is the field on which those tendencies of human experience come into conflict in conscious expression, though it's not the battlefield where those conflicts can be properly judged, let alone won. That doesnt make morality as-such irrelevant or worth resentment, morality (or I would prefer "ethical instinct" as I explained earlier ITT) is a part of human experience that is like all others subject to the contingencies of material historical factors (one of which is the persistent reality of human life).

>>19193
Ok fair enough, but in the same regard, it's much easier to emigrate to the first world in cuba.

>>19194
>Idk if OP dropped the drop
No clue what that means.

>>19194
>but I think the focus a lot of people have here on productive forces and self interest as personal reasons to advocate and work for communism is pretty silly and gets too hung up on anti-moralism and anti-humanism.
I agree.

As for the rest of your post, I think it's easy to say that any empathic human can imagine themselves "in the shoes" of any other human potentially and therefore wish them better shoes.

>>19192
Because having a generalized system of distribution of resources according to people's needs is more efficient, and the amount of goods that are produced far exceeds either scenerio of if we were to disregard the less capable or not, and meeting the needs of the less capable will make them more capable, which increases the amount that can be made, ad infinitum… The current system literally requires dumping resources to avoid meeting needs in order to function normally. Scarcity has been entirely artificial for a long time now.

>>19197
lot of words that doesn't explain how I can't take resources in an unjust system than a just one.

>>19198
>take resources
take more*

>>19198
That was barely long enough to be a paragraph, what do you mean a lot of words? What did what I say have to do with saying you 'cannot take more resources in an unjust system than a just one'? My arguement circumvents justice as a concept.

>>19200
That was a fair amount of words. What did it have to do? For the individual, inefficiency that benefits the self is way better than fairness.

>>19201
It seems like you've created a vacuum spook where you're trying to avoid fairness, when the thing you're actually avoiding has nothing to do with fairness.

>>19198
>Ask stupid questions
>get basic answers
>ignore and then ask even stupider questions
Hey dumbass, it is clearly evident you have no fucking clue what anyone explaining basic Marxist shit to you is talking about.

Sad that modern communists want to just turn it into a loser ideology. So bet it.

>>19203
I'm pretty sure this is just the jannies running a monthly test to see how well we can handle bait. If so then I'd say we got a D- this round.

>>19205
>can't answer basic questions
>hope to have revolution
Yeah the magic 8 ball says the oods don't look good

>>19205
It's not really worth the spending the cognitive labor time 'arguing' against a spooked retard, or some lumpen agent. The people who put actual time into their responses were just trying to guide the OP. Siberia

Lol at all the "marxist" tards who think they will ever become more than the irrelevant garbage they are now that can't explain to anyone what they stand for.

>>19141
>>19138
for reference, that 99th global percentile number ($124,720) is 88th percentile in the US. So 12% of USanos earn that level or higher.

>>19209
what did you gay?

>>19196
Typo, meant "dropped the thread". Though now it seems like they (you?) just didnt respond to my former post

>As for the rest of your post, I think it's easy to say that any empathic human can imagine themselves "in the shoes" of any other human potentially and therefore wish them better shoes.

Of course. The distinction I'm making is that to wish them better shoes is, even if it is morality (conceding to you that it may be, I believe it is a sort of pre-moral ethical impulse), is not where morality ends. Many people in our world, as it exists, would (rationally) believe it immoral to give them money to buy shoes (theyll use it for vices, or maybe theres more pressing needs than shoes, etc), and even if it is considered moral to give them shoes outright, this needs to be done within a certain moral(!) framework, namely the donation of individuals or religious bodies, because it is considered immoral to prioritize the shoes of one over the autonomy of another (the latter would necessarily be curtailed by a leveraging of social power towards the provision of basic needs like shoes, food, etc for all). And particularly dogmatic individualists and capitalists will even insist that giving anything away to a needy stranger without some kind of equivelant exchange is immoral, because it will only tend towards reinforcing the reasons theyre needy to begin with (here lack of ambition, misperception of how the world really works, learned helplessness, etc). Even if I reject it, that is certainly a rational moral framework, and it is one that is not even always poorly suited to helping people, even if it does so by encouraging a nearly sociopathic relationship to others. On the other hand, if the wealthy began to supply their children with shoes by raiding orphanges supply as part of a strange fashion trend, I would of course say that that is a despicable way of providing the barefooted with shoes, and I would feel entirely consistent in that judgement despite being technically inconsistent with the former moral precept that sometimes its okay to help some at the expense of others.

I am not trying to be obtuse, but as I see it this is the significant difference. Morality is not wishing that the barefooted had shoes, it's the way in which you would find it acceptable to shoe them.

before the needy can be fed porky blood must be shed. it will seem a lot less altruistic to your kind then.

>>1516221
you are first and foremost a dork who won't pass on genes in any paradigm

>>19214
tf is this fanart

>>1516278
LMAO back at you Jimmy Neutron. Open your mouth.

>>19216
Noticer and others of his ilk are just attention whores who get off on negative attention. Ignore and report.

>>19083
>What is the self-interest in helping the needy?
If you are prole the needy are potential competitors who driven by misery will be willing to work for less and less money, driving down your wage, even if they do not directly compete with you, they will compete with people who driven by lower wages will move to other sectors, including yours, lowering overall wages, so as a prole it is in your direct interest to ensure that no only poverty is not a thing, but that all matters high exploitative conditions are also not a thing i.e. slaves. Thus it is in your direct interest to have the whole working class improve at once. Your interests as worker are directly tied to your class, even if your interests as a person are to become a capitalist

>>19083
>How is it in anyone's self-interest to try to overthrow the system and create an egalitarian society vs spending their efforts trying to rise in the unjust hierarchical system we live under today?
Why does it gotta be just one? Proles try to do both, they try to become capitalist and also improve their conditions as workers through collective action. However, in our current system, it is imposible for everyone to become capitalists, thus the majority of people continue to pursue improving their lives through collective action instead of the opposite, due to them failing. Then, it comes to be that eventually a sector who is class concious appearss, and fights for the collective improving of conditions of the class as a whole, i.e. a communist party. confronted with the realization that crisis ensure there is a minimum level of poverty always, the majorty of people are driven to overthrow class society

>>19218
So to answer your question, Marxism is not moralistic because it merely gets ahead of the curve, and realises that the only way for the proles to truly improve their conditions is to fight collectively and crush the bourgeois. It does not say this is good, or moral, but only that it is the only way to get out of the cycle of exploitation of capital

Also if you respnd only to this comment, and not to the one I made above, I will swat your house at 1 am

It would quite literally be to my benefit.
I hate this bitch of a system.
Secondly, I don’t like seeing people suffer needlessly.
Simple as

>>19083
All economics and sociology implies some moral element. The subject matter is about intrinsically moral agents, human beings.

You're regurgitating a sparknotes, lo-fi rendition of Marx's thought, which in its actual substance is descriptive and analytical. There is Marx the theorist and Marx the revolutionary. The theorist described the laws of history and the internal contradictions of capitalism. The revolutionary felt that the poor and exploited should fix things for themselves. Theory and praxis are famously related in marxism, but they are two different things.

The praxis side of things obviously has to do with moral emotions of injustice and retribution, because that's what animates human beings. The theoretical side is conceptual and intellectual.

>>19183
>spark a revolution
Who said I care about sparking a revolution?
1. I care about Marxian class analysis but am not an orthodox Marxist.
2. I care way more about damaging the power of the capitalist class and asserting my will to power on them than creating any socialist utopia "overnight."

>How can Marxism be considered anything other than a moralist aka altruistic philosophy?
"Moralism" in the context of Marxism is typically a critique of observations like "World War II happened because Hitler was evil." While the vast majority of people would agree that Hitler was evil, the explanation is moralizing; at a basic level, a Marxist would approach this by looking into the underlying forces in (economic) practice that resulted in the Nazi Party and figures like Hitler.

Another usage of "moralism" is in opposition to hypostasizing moral judgments/values despite changes in the situation. In this sense, Marxists tend to be close to a historicist form of moral realism, although there's no necessary link between Marxism and moral realism. It's something like an elective affinity.

As for "ethics," there is a distinction in (continental) philosophy between "social" morality/mores (in German philosophy, Sittlichkeit) and individual morality (Moralität). Hegel treats the two separately throughout his works, and it's given particular emphasis in his Philosophy of Right.

This is also to be distinguished from ethics overall as a topic in philosophy, which deals with values and behavior without necessarily amounting to an "ethical system." Heidegger discusses ethics in the "subject matter" sense often enough, but not in terms of a system for moral prescriptions in the way that Bentham and Kant did.
>How is it in anyone's self-interest to try to overthrow the system and create an egalitarian society vs spending their efforts trying to rise in the unjust hierarchical system we live under today?
If I believe (rightly or wrongly) that it's essentially impossible to "rise in the unjust hierarchical system," overthrowing that system will be more in my self-interest. "Self-interest" by itself doesn't imply a common judgment of rightness of means or ends; this is the basic problem with the question. One can be a Marxist out of selfishness or altruism. Similarly, a moral system constructed on the basis of self-interest doesn't necessarily imply selfishness; Spinoza's own ethical system is both constructed on the basis of self-interest and altruistic.

Whether one is a Marxist out of selfishness or whether one's moral system is constructed out of self-interest is irrelevant so far as Marxism is concerned. Individuals may have altruistic reasons for adopting Marxism, but they may not, and it doesn't matter either way.

>>19223
Hitler was a useful idiot who got pissed off at his art school teacher and some random jews IRL. He also was a chauvinist who served in the military and got influenced by the Volkisch movement which was very strong in Germany back in the day (and which Stirner and Nietzsche themselves mocked), and racial eugenics and segregation (thank you, USA, you are my best friend).

>>19224 (cont.)
Basically, Nazi Germany is the fault of American colonialism and German reactards. Hitler's ideas weren't even formulated by him in the first place, his schizo brain has just collected all the reactionary ideas that were prevailent in our retarded society at the time.

>>19223
>Spinoza's own ethical system is both constructed on the basis of self-interest and [self-interest]
Unconscious egoists, SMH.

>>19171
Altruism is like trading with other people but on a longer timescale and with smaller returns. You give a random guy food and he might someday give something back, even indirectly. Also religious and political organisations often use it for PR. If we count welfare as altruism too then it has more concrete effects, like someone not mugging you just to live.

>>19175
>Cover themselves in shit and run out in the streets if it suits their ego
Diogenes, is that you?

>>19175
>ought
"How DARE you not do whatever you want!? You have sinned against the church of egoism, reeee!!"

>>19227
>You give a random guy food and he might someday give something back
I mean, kindness seems like an immediate return to me. Many people seem to like it when you treat them kindly. But what do I know? I have no feelings.

Regardless, that's not altruism if you just enjoy seeing happy faces and don't like getting people angry or sad. Altruism is when you make it your sacred duty to help the Humanity. Altruism commands you to help everyone and everything and sacrifice your well-being for the sake of others, which can be suicidal. Patriotic soldiers are the most altruistic people out there.

>>19230
Yes, altruism isn't seeding low cost gratitude investments. I think martyrdom is a different question. One can give more over a lifetime than they can give in onetime sacrifice of their life usually.

Back to the topic of the thread. If we're talking about logic, then treason is logical at any point where it's opportune. You fight for communism, but the capitalists decide to buy you out for more than you'd ever get under communism, doesn't it logically self-interestedly make sense to sell out?

>>19231
>One can give more over a lifetime than they can give in onetime sacrifice of their life usually
Do you just assume that to conscious egoists life has so little value that sacrificing it isn't a loss for them at all? You're thinking of the self-interest in purely market terms. Self-interest is never limited to a mere accumulation of capital, it has no limits.

People are already egoistic.

<But the one who acts from love of filthy profit indeed does it on his own behalf, since in any case there is nothing that one does not do for his own sake, among other things, everything done for the glory of God; but because he seeks profit, he is a slave of profit, not beyond profit; he is one who belongs to profit, to the moneybag, not to himself; he is not his own. Doesn’t a person whom the passion of greed rules follow this master’s orders, and if one time a weak good-naturedness creeps over him, doesn’t this appear as an exceptional case of precisely the same sort as when devout believers are sometimes abandoned by their Lord’s guidance and beguiled by the wiles of the “devil?” So a greedy person is not a self-owned person, but a slave, and he can do nothing for his own sake, without at the same time doing it for his master’s sake—precisely like the God-fearing person.

>>19231
>but the capitalists decide to buy you out for more than you'd ever get under communism, doesn't it logically self-interestedly make sense to sell out?
Again, there are other desires people pursue. And they're not limited to the profit. But you can do whatever you want, there is no "holy book" of egoism. Some people may prioritize things other than profit and that's still a parfectly egoistic behavior.

>>19083
>spending their efforts trying to rise in the unjust hierarchical system we live under today?
What's the point of that? To be an exploiting cunt?

Because the issue with Capitalism is not a moral failing of individuals(that porkies are inherently bad) but that they must partake in economic exploitation in order to exist; otherwise no profit would be made. Likewise, as constant capital accumulates(i.e machinery and other resources to increase labor productivity), you create more products for the proletariat to consume, but employ less wage-laborers who would be the buyers of such profits, causing decreasing profit rates eventually leading to crisis.

You could have the most compassionate humans in the world running this system(Marx's arguments in Capital already assume that things are being paid for at value and not below it) and it would still end in crisis eventually under its own economic laws. That's why it's not moralist.

Capitalism is inefficient.
The exploitation of the "needy" is inefficient
The abolition of these inefficiencies means more resources for the vast majority of people.
More resources for everyone means more resources for each individual. Including you, the reader.